Research

Quotes from this article:

“Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten,” B. F. Skinner put it. In other words, the function of education is not to enable the learner to acquire specific skills or knowledge so much as to inculcate certain habits and ways of thinking. In a hyper-capitalist society, in which educational institutions chiefly serve to rank and categorize job applicants, the role of schools is not just to prepare us for the working world, but to resign us to it, reducing our ability to imagine any other form of learning.

(Introduction written in 2021.)

To speak of deschooling is to speak in favor of doing—engaging in self-directed, purposeful, meaningful activity—and against education—in the sense of learning directed from above, cut off from every other sphere of life and carried on under pressure of bribe and threat, greed and fear.

I'm going to be one of those people who is a bit nitpicky, but I think the common push from anarchists against using the word "education" (or using it to mean "institutionalised learning") is actually a problem for us in the grand scheme of things.

The first reason is that, colloquially, 'education' has come to embody what it means 'to learn'. If we discuss being "against education," people are reading it as "against learning." This automatically tunes out a lot of people who would want to join with us, to explore these topics with us, to understand them. (Side note: While some fields use a more limited definition of 'education', fields like anthropology generally do not; they use it to discuss systems of learning, which are incredibly varied.)

The second is because it is a useful term to co-opt for our own uses (see above for partial explanation). Education can and does happen everywhere, just as we say of learning. Learning is systematic, even it isn't institutionalised.

Using 'school' to highlight institutionalisation of learning is far more useful.

It doesn't surprise me that most of the people who engage in talking about going 'beyond education' or 'being against education' are those who haven't worked in or alongside people in compulsory schooling. This isn't to say that those who have a foot in compulsory schooling are better, but we are more engaged with how people understand education and learning. This is often neglected and to our own detriment.

And yes, all of this out of a simple word choice.

Your average music student thinks of music as a thing to learn, not a thing to do. Yet despite academies and conservatories, methodologies and method books, pedagogies and pedagogues and millions of rapped knuckles, the proper active verb in relation to the word music is still “to play.” You play music. You can also make music. Playing and making are the essential elements of being a musician. Yet instead of playing and making, the student practices compositions or works on assignments. If you practice, the implication is that you aren’t really doing it. You are always in preparation for when you’re really going to do it. Well, when are you really going to do it? At a lesson for your teacher? For an adjudicator in an exam or a judge in a competition? For parents or friends? Once you’ve really done it and your parent, teacher, or judge lets you know whether you’ve succeeded in making music or not, will you ever want to do it again?

Sentiment holds, but I take issue with the framing of skills. People do learn music, even if not done in a formal setting; they can learn the theory by first applying it (they may even find out about it and realise how it connects to their own practice). They learn skills related to it, even if they're not explicit.

To associate "learning" with "teacher-student oriented schooling" is a detriment to us all, and so I take issue with this idea. Can people learn from experts? Of course. Can they direct themselves to figuring out what works? Obviously, they should.

It's also ludicrous to associate "practice" in this way, too. We all need to practice skills of all sorts, for ourselves and for others. Does it need to be in a classroom setting? No, and ideally it wouldn't be (or at least not all the time).

Even if I'm speaking Slovak when at a gathering, I'm still practicing it. Practice and play can work in tandem.

Modern forced schooling started in Prussia in 1819, with a clear vision of what centralized schools could deliver: obedient soldiers to the army, obedient workers to the mines, well-subordinated civil servants to the government, well-subordinated clerks to industry, and citizens who thought alike about major issues. Thirty-three years after the fateful invention of the centralized learning institution, the US adopted the Prussian style of schooling as its own.

Compulsory education is still meeting our superpower society’s need to train citizens for subservience. In addition, education now prepares people for careers in various industries that Fichte couldn’t have imagined in his time. The biggest surprise of all is that education has itself become an industry. In a progressively mechanized world, in which self-checkout at the grocery store and e-ticket computer check-in at the airport are replacing the jobs that once kept citizens busily integrated into society, what can be done with all the surplus workers except to postpone endlessly their entry into the workforce?

It is said that today’s high school graduates can be sure that, if they are to have jobs at all, they will perform tasks we cannot even imagine yet. In the limbo between the known and the unknown, there is education. Teachers and administrators can always be employed when other jobs are scarce, and those taught to believe they won’t be ready to live life until they’ve been properly prepared form a ready mass of consumers. Would-be employees spend progressively more and more time competing with one another for an upper hand, an extra point, a longer list of credentials. This is an effective way to divert attention from the impending doom of unemployment and a ready explanation for why people some never get the dream jobs they thought awaited them—they just didn’t study enough.

Genuinely wish they would've highlighted more about the expectations that teachers must be preparing students for "jobs of the future." The kinds of discussion that teachers often hear about what they should be doing is beyond amazing, considering much of it is as if they are supposed to guess what jobs will exist in 10-20 years.

This has definitely come out more ever since before the DotCom bust happened, which was when teachers were lambasted in the media for "failing to prepare students for the future." ... As if we all are given some sort of crystal ball to know what to do. (Which, even if that were a thing, it's entirely absurd.)

Once upon a time, only the rich and powerful sent their children to school.

Kind of. This misses the mark because the rich and powerful didn't need to, and their children often received less schooling than those of the middling clerical and mercantile classes. People who had money but not status and thus used schools to acquire status through prestigious placements or professional titles.

The rich and powerful, the aristocracy, were often more able to secure positions for their less educated sons through nepotism.

In today’s credit-based economy, in which everyone is expected to be middle class and most must live beyond their means to maintain this illusion, the education industry has made a killing with a new form of protection racket. In order to be equipped for employment of all but the worst kinds, people must pay thousands or tens of thousands or even more to go to schools that teach few of the skills the job market actually requires. This traps them in debt for decades, forcing them to go on to sell themselves wherever the economy will have them. It’s a highly sophisticated form of indentured servitude. Is there really no more “educational”—let alone worthwhile—way to spend that much money? And would so many students, fresh out of college and desperate to live freely for once, immediately seek employment if they didn’t have such crippling debts to pay off?

From the perspective of the government, this old-fashioned institution is unreliable and unsurveillable. Schools and daycare systems, in complementary compulsory and voluntary models, ensure that children absorb certain values.

This runs counter to how conservatives often view the family, which is actually more surveillable than many people recognise. (After all, one only need to look at how some children under authoritarian dictatorships reported their own families to the government, even if by accident.)

A better connection here is that schooling makes surveillance of the family easier. It also has used children as a way to transmit the acceptable values to their families, though that is far more obvious with migrant families.

In pop culture, these homeschooling and non-schooling families are represented as hippies, religious fundamentalists, or extremist freaks.

Though true, this is because religious fundamentalists and extremists have overwhelmed most reporting about homeschooling and have influenced the majority of laws for it.

Also, homeschooling families are less often portrayed as hippies.

For the sake of deschooling, we should work to rid our minds of the prejudices that would have us view those who drop out of educational treatment as “failures” or “delinquents,” strays who must be caught and brought back into the fold. When we hear these things about school dropouts, we hear them from the point of view of the dogcatchers. Instead, we could view dropouts as refuseniks, conscientious objectors to a stifling and dehumanizing process. Many students whose caretakers defined them as dropouts have since redefined themselves as successful escapees from a useless educational career.

By the time they leave school, they have been attacked in both soul and body. Understandably, many refuse further “care” after suffering through intensive remedial programs that imply that they are unable to succeed within the system or to make it into society at large by any route approved of by their teachers. In schools that teach them nothing about themselves, they have been forced to learn to fake everything. Many have come to see school as a worldwide soul-shredder that junks the majority and hardens an elite to govern the others.

Most teachers are generous, intelligent, creative people. Some are very talented or knowledgeable in their fields and would be great mentors or friends outside the constraints of school. Many have given up chances to make lots of money because they believe in teaching even though it pays poorly. Especially if they are men, they sometimes endure years of being hassled by their families—“why don’t you find a real career?” Many teachers are terrific people. But the role they are forced to play in school keeps them from behaving as real people in their interactions with certain other real people, that is to say, students. Their talent and energy is drained by the task of constantly telling people what to do. As instructors, these good people scrape their sides against concrete barriers as they take the bureaucratic twists and turns any school requires them to. This is the nature of the fundamental restraints of institutional schooling.

Yes and no. I continually find many people who do not fit this mold becoming teachers; I find a lot of adults who think the worst of kids, who refuse to give them the space to be themselves. I find a lot of people who genuinely believe that punishing children for mistakes is the best way to help them learn.

So I disagree that there are a lot of "generous" people working as teachers.

But the role of teacher is covered in restraints. "Do not befriend your students" being one of the biggest and most conflicting. "You are not their equal" following closely behind it. Both of these are so incredibly wrong.

Let us not discriminate against the uncertified. If we must assess competence for a given task, let us assess it as directly as we can, and not conflate competence with the length of time spent sitting in educational institutions. Those of us who have spent a lot of time in those institutions can do our part to deflate the value of educational currency by refusing to boast of our own “official” educational credentials. Strike these from your self-image; demand that others judge you by your actual talents and accomplishments, the way you would judge others.

Let us frequent libraries, cooperatives, museums, theaters, and other voluntary, less coercive community institutions. Where they are inaccessible, let us work to make them accessible. Let us create more spaces in our communities where the young, the old, and those in between can get together to pursue un-programmed activities of all sorts. Let us end the policy of shunting young and old into separate institutions “for their own good.”

Let us spit on exploitative labor of all kinds, not just child labor. For the first several hundred thousand years of human existence, young people meaningfully participated in many aspects of securing the collective survival of their communities. It is age discrimination that mandates that young people must be taught about the world before they are allowed to learn from it by participating in it.

Silent and sustained attention is constantly interrupted by programmed noises. Specialized school subjects and the school bells dividing them into regular fifty-minute intervals interrupt the thoughts of any individual attempting to think critically inside the school.

We all have observed ongoing conservative culture wars over “family values.” These “values,” of course, are about kids: precious, obedient, little spittin’ images of upstanding agreeable citizens. People wary of change often fear that the young, the heart of the nuclear family, represent a potentially disruptive force.

This suspicion is well-founded. Young people—as anyone who takes them seriously can attest—often demonstrate an ability to draw attention to the political dimensions underlying everyday life: to the dubious pretenses by which authorities, often including parental authorities, establish themselves. Without censure, with the room to be confidently inquisitive and direct, young ones can discern the fundamentals of social relations by unearthing the root—that is, radical—details that betray the reality of those relations, reminding us of the hidden roots of power on which authority rests. Spying that loose edge, they may just pry it back to ask: Why? Why do my sneakers say “Made in Pakistan”? Why are the sidewalks in this part of town crumbling? Why are we supposed to go to school?

If we agree that children are good at learning, let our attitude and dealings with young people bear that out. Let us resist the temptation to become educators, to rub the noses of the young in our greater experience by unthinkingly adopting the roles of teacher, helper, instructor. Let us trust people to figure things out for themselves unless they ask for our help. As it turns out, they will ask frequently. People whose curiosity has not been deadened by education are bubbling with questions. The toxicity inherent in education is precisely that so much of the teaching that goes on is unwelcome.

Furthermore, in support of not only young people but all people, we would do well to nurture more accessible everyday places where knowledge and tools are not locked up in institutions or hoarded as closely guarded secrets. It’s easy enough to offer, without imposition, to share our skills with others. Take on an apprentice. Hang a shingle outside your home describing what you do. Let your friends and neighbors know that you can make such an offer to any serious and committed person.

If you do not wish to institutionalize your mind and heart within the limitations of school, consider also questioning classic love relationships, transportation norms, and other things people take for granted. Accompany your second look at schools with a second look at all things, all the time. Let us not cede the responsibilities we have to one another to institutions.

But should you be interested in receiving such an education, beware. Like Frodo and the ring, to put an institutional tool in your hand temporarily, even if with the goal in mind of destroying its power, is to risk falling victim to its allure and misguiding principles.